A society which penalizes some children because they are not white, others because they are not male, indoctrinating in them a sense of worthlessness, can still lay the blame for the waste of its young on the bad mothers who have somehow failed to be superhuman, who have somehow failed to rear, in a callous and ruthless social order, welladjusted obedient, achieving, nonalienated children.

Truth is a thing of this world: It is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.

—Michel Foucault 1977

This paper reports the results of a 1997–98 survey designed to explore the careers of the University of Michigan Law School's minority graduates from the classes of 1970 through 1996, and of a random sample of Michigan Law School's white alumni who graduated during the same years. It is to date the most detailed quantitative exploration of how minority students fare after they graduate from law school and enter law practice or related careers. The results reveal that almost all of Michigan Law School's minority graduates pass a bar exam and go on to have careers that appear successful by conventional measures. In particular, the survey indicates that minority graduates (defined so as to include graduates with African American, Latino, and Native American backgrounds) are no less successful than white graduates, whether success is measured by the log of current income, self-reported satisfaction, or an index of service contributions. Also, although an admissions index that combines LSAT scores and undergraduate grade-point average is a significant predictor of law school grades, it does not predict career success on any of our three outcome measures. Michigan is a highly selective law school; our results may not generalize to people who have graduated from other law schools.

There are 5 African Americans among the 433 students in The University of Texas School of Law's class of 2000. There are 7 in the class of 2001, and 7 in the class of 2002. With 1,387 students, the UT School of Law is big. The 19 African American students comprise 1.4% of the total.

Lempert, Chambers, and Adams (2000; hereafter LCA) make an important contribution to both the debate on affirmative action in legal education and the sociology of the legal profession. We find their empirical results credible and agree with their interpretations of the data related to arguments about the role of affirmative action in Michigan's admissions policies. Yet, in crafting an analysis to demonstrate the similarities in the career outcomes of minority and white graduates, they have minimized evidence that points to substantial continuing patterns of inequality by race and gender within the legal profession. Moreover, LCA only begin to illuminate the mechanisms that produce the career patterns they document. Of particular importance is the question of how race, class, and gender interact to shape lawyers' careers-a topic LCA largely reserve for future analyses.

Lempert, Chambers, and Adams's superb new study of the careers of minority and white graduates of the University of Michigan Law School will come as welcome news to those who value diversity on this nation's college and professional school campuses. Alongside the Bowen-Box study (1998), to which the authors link their work, the Michigan data provide powerful evidence of the many benefits of affirmative action for both minority and majority students, as well as for a constituency that is often overlooked in the debate over affirmative action—namely, the people these aspiring professionals are intended to serve. More important, the authors' careful analysis reveals what many have long suspected. LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs “seem to have no relationship to success after law school, whether success is measured by earned income, career satisfaction, or service contributions” (Lempert, Chambers, and Adams 2000, 401).

In the field of legal education research, everyone talks about the importance of examining long-term outcomes, but nobody has done much about it-until now. ‘Michigan's Minority Graduates in Practice’ (Lempert, Chambers, and Adams 2000) is pioneering work, providing the most comprehensive look anyone has yet undertaken at the long-term experiences, achievements, and attitudes of specific law school cohorts. Moreover, it is work done at the highest social science standards-a standard not met often enough in this field. The care and professionalism of Richard Lempert, David Chambers, and Terry Adams will rightly give their findings enormous credibility.

Lempert, Chambers, and Adams's study of the careers of three generations of students of color admitted to the University of Michigan Law School fills several important gaps in our knowledge about the consequences and implications of affirmative action protocols in law school admission. First, it provides empirical data for the argument that conventional test-based admission policies both mask and support deep flaws in the way we allocate opportunity and privilege.

Before making a few remarks in response to those who commented on our article (Lempert, Chambers, and Adams 2000), we would like to express our gratitude to the editors of Law and Social Inquiry for securing these commentaries and to the people who wrote them. The comments both highlight the potential uses to which our research and similar studies may be put and give us the opportunity to address methodological concerns and questions that other readers of our article may share with those who commented on it.